100. By a 'concrete thing' is meant an individual Substance
conceived of with all its attributes about it. The term is not
confined to material substances. A spirit conceived of under personal
attributes is as concrete as plum-pudding.

101. Since things are divided exhaustively into substances and
attributes, it follows that any term which is not the name of a thing
capable of being conceived to exist by itself, must be an abstract
term. Individual substances can alone be conceived to exist by
themselves: all their qualities, actions, passions, and
inter-relations, all their states, and all events with regard to them,
presuppose the existence of these individual substances. All names
therefore of such things as those just enumerated are abstract
terms. The term 'action,' for instance, is an abstract term. For how
could there be action without an agent? The term 'act' also is equally
abstract for the same reason. The difference between 'action' and
'act' is not the difference between abstract and concrete, but the
difference between the name of a process and the name of the
corresponding product. Unless acts can be conceived to exist without
agents they are as abstract as the action from which they result.

102. Since every term must be either abstract or concrete, it may be
asked--Are attributives abstract or concrete? The answer of course
depends upon whether they are names of substances or names of
attributes. But attributives, it must be remembered, are never
directly names of anything, in the way that subject-terms are; they
are only names of things in virtue of being predicated of
them. Whether an attributive is abstract or concrete, depends on the
nature of the subject of which it is asserted or denied. When we say
'This man is noble,' the term 'noble' is concrete, as being the name